Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion

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Unbundle delete for some U1 and G7s

Watchers here may be interested in Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)#Allow_any_logged_in_editor_to_delete_their_own_U1_and_G7_cases it is similar to a proposed change from some time back that I think got consensus but would have required a bot. ϢereSpielChequers 21:29, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

(I am over 30k) How to use a speedy template?

I am over 30k edits, and still I have to search at least two pages to get a speedy template right. Why cannot I find the procedure & templates in a single page? WP, stop telling me I am stupid. -DePiep (talk) 22:17, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Have you seen WP:FIELD? →Στc. 22:24, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

You mean: search three pages to get a speedy? No I haven't. -DePiep (talk) 22:25, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

May I suggest Twinkle? It gives you an easy dialogue box on the page from which you can select the correct template, which is automatically added to the page. That's assuming of course that you have a basic grasp of the different criteria and can remember which one goes where with a one line description...very useful for me. Nolelover ^{Talk·Contribs} 22:28, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Of course you may suggest Twinkle. And I decline the suggestion right away. I know you are in (A)GF, but this is not what I asked for. WP:SPEEDY should do the job, in single page. Is not TW an outside thing? Like AWB, HOTCAT, and every other app while I ask for a basic thing: how to do a speedy? The SPEEDY page cannot explain how to do a speedy? -DePiep (talk) 22:52, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Oh in that case I completely agree with you. The only policy-based page that is concise and informative enough for me is WP:VRS. I just wan't sure if you were looking for the template names, which Twinkle easily provides. Nolelover ^{Talk·Contribs} 02:12, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Never saw VRS, but usualy I look up WP:42. Or WP:UAUQLUE, as I remember it by easy mnemonics. Still, after some deep thinking, there is nothing speedy in there. -DePiep (talk) 02:45, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

What is wrong with the instructions at Wikipedia:CSD#Criteria? Assuming you know how to place a template on the page they should be clear enough. Yoenit (talk) 15:04, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

The History of G7

I researched the history of G7 as part of deciding how to vote in a recent DRV. Because some might be inclined to do the same in the future, I'm posting this on this page to save those users the trouble. Of course, there are probably some regular readers of this page who will enjoy reading this anyway. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 03:33, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Ratification and early development of G7 (2005-2006)

G7 was not one of the original criteria for speedy deletion. It originated as one of many potential criteria proposed for addition in January 2005. Of those, only three – the items which would later become G7, A3, and A4 – were ratified by the community. G7 was ratified by a vote of 156-21. The newly added criterion provided for the deletion of:

Any article which is requested for deletion by the original author, provided the author reasonably explains that it was created by mistake, and the article was edited only by its author.

On January 16, 2005, SimonP did the honors of adding the three new criteria, including the earliest version of G7. Our understanding of G7 can be informed by some of the instructive comments which were made around the time of the vote.

• MarkSweep wrote, “If you see a valid article listed for speedy deletion, you can try to prevent its deletion by editing it (it may still get deleted for unrelated reasons). Also the original author nominating it is supposed to 'reasonably [explain] that it was created by mistake'. Ideally, trying to explain that a perfectly valid article should be deleted would not come across as a reasonable request, so it cannot be deleted under the proposed policy item.”
• Dori wrote, “This is a matter of courtesy. Even if the article is perfectly good, if no one else has edited it, and the author regrets his decision to put it here, we should honor it. It's just a matter of being a good host of information. People should want to contribute here, it should not be trap of any sort. Once someone else has contributed to it, even if to correct a single spelling, then we can no longer delete it as a matter of courtesy. It doesn't have anything to do with 'owning' it. The author has the copyrights. Due to the GFDL we are legally OK with keeping it. I argue that it would not be morally OK.”
• Thryduulf noted, “If someone else was going to add something to it, they can recreate it themselves.”
• Skysmith explained, “If the writers realize their mistakes and want them corrected, all the better.”
• Isomorphic noted, “Of course, we are not obligated to delete an article just because the author requests it.”

As these comments demonstrate, the crux of G7 when it was ratified by the community was the “mistake clause,” which read, “provided the author reasonably explains that it was created by mistake.”

Even in 2005, there were already complaints about the CSD being too byzantine. On November 24, Radiant! removed the mistake clause as part of his broader attempt to make the entire policy page simpler. There was a thread on the talk page about his changes, but it did not include specific discussion of the removal of the mistake clause. On December 20, 2005, David Levy restored the mistake clause, “the lack of which changes [the criterion’s] meaning to something radically different than what was intended.”

On January 9, 2006, R3m0t added a blanking provision to G7 for the first time, after this talk page discussion. This marked the end of the early development of G7; it would be static, with both the mistake clause and the blanking provision intact, for over a year.

Major changes without discussion (2007)

On February 11, 2007, Steel significantly changed G7 by removing the mistake clause. Steel did not explain or discuss this edit anywhere on-wiki, nor was the edit prompted by any on-wiki policy discussion that I can find.

I looked at Steel's deletion log to find an impetus for his edit. On February 11, 2007, he deleted the following pages under G7:

• 19:17, February 11, 2007 Steel (talk | contribs) deleted "Eric Grete" ‎ (CSD G7)
• 19:19, February 11, 2007 Steel (talk | contribs) deleted "Greenfield school" ‎ (CSD G7)
• 20:22, February 11, 2007 Steel (talk | contribs) deleted "File:Antigay.png" ‎ (CSD G7)

That last one preceded his edit to WP:CSD by only 13 minutes, making it the likeliest candidate. As best as I can tell without the ability to view deleted edits, the image was associated with a userbox which Steel was also deleting. At 19:49, he deleted Template:User homophobia under T1, “divisive and inflammatory.” He informed the userbox’s creator, User:PatPeter, of the deletion, prompting a hostile discussion. It appears that PatPeter recreated the userbox in his userspace (at User:PatPeter\User homophobia); Steel deleted it under T1 at 20:08. It appears that PatPeter then recreated the userbox a second time in the same location. What happened next I cannot say without access to deleted edits; however, at 20:22, Steel deleted the userbox under U1 (user request) and the associated image under G7. It’s possible that PatPeter tagged the pages for deletion; it’s possible that he blanked one or both; and it’s also possible that Steel interpreted this comment as a request for deletion. Regardless, after these deletions, Steel made no further edits and took no further admin actions before making his edit to WP:CSD. So why did he make the policy edit? My educated guess is that the file he had deleted did not strictly meet G7 because it was not “mistakenly created,” so he sought to change the policy so it would be less restrictive. His edit was not reverted, and thus it became ingrained in the policy.

On the next day, February 12, 2007, Ais523 added to G7 a requirement that deletion must be requested “in good faith.” According to his edit summary, he did this “to address the reason why the bit just removed from G7 was there in the first place using a different method.” It does not appear that this was discussed, but it was not reverted and thus became ingrained in the policy. It’s safe to assume that “in good faith” was meant in the standard Wikipedia sense of the phrase, i.e. without malice towards the project.

In a brief April 2007 discussion, an editor expressed concern about the removal of the mistake clause. Two administrators responded, indicating that they had no problems with the “in good faith” wording.

Exceptions to G7 are carved out (2008-2010)

Without the mistake clause, G7 was at least technically far more expansive than it had been when the community ratified it. In the period 2008-2010, five exceptions were carved out of G7.

• On July 24, 2008, Rossami added an exception for redirects created after page-moves.
• On August 9, 2008, Ned Scott added an exception to the blanking provision for pages in userspace, in the wake of these two discussions.
• On November 20, 2009, Dank added an exception to blanking provision for categories.
• On December 12, 2009, Davidwr added an exception to the entire criterion for articles with other substantial contributors to the associated talk page.
• On May 27, 2010, JamesBWatson added an exception to the entire criterion for user talk pages.

During those years, there were a few discussions on WT:CSD which provide important clarifications of G7:

• November 2008: A group of administrators concludes that admins can decline to delete under G7 articles which were not contributed to Wikipedia by mistake. They extend this principle to allow the undeletion of articles which were previously deleted under G7, upon request of a potential contributor to the page.
• February 2009: There is a general sentiment that G7 should not be used in instances where deletion is contested. However, the examples used in the discussion are bad-faith requests, so the problem of contested good-faith requests is not really examined here.
• March 2009: Again, there is some sentiment that G7 deletions are a “courtesy” that does not have to be extended to contributors. However, the ethical problems with “forcibly tying [a contributor] to a biography unwanted by the subject” are raised, and some editors acknowledge the appropriateness of deletion in such cases.

Since 2010, G7 has been more or less static.

TL;DR

The original intent of G7 was to allow contributors to request the deletion of pages they created but now regard as mistakes, and even though that clause was removed from the criterion in 2007 (by a single administrator, without discussion or explanation), it’s still an important undercurrent running through our understanding of G7. If an editor adds an article to Wikipedia and comes to regard that as a mistake, administrators are encouraged – but not obligated – to kindly extend them the courtesy of deleting it. A Stop at Willoughby (talk) 03:33, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Office actions listed twice?

Since office actions are the basis of the G9 speedy deletion criterion, why do we list them in the intro as a method of deletion besides CSD? Nyttend backup (talk) 05:50, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Good question. It didn't even make sense since the section is headlined as a list of non-speedt forms of deletion. I have boldly removed, added in sticky prods in its place since that appears to belong on that list, and took the opportunity to list all the deletion discussion individual pages in short form next to the entry for deletion discussions.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 06:06, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Personally I think we ought to remove G9 instead. Office actions are performed under Foundation-backed WP:OFFICE, not the community's speedy deletion process. G9 might have some value as an explanatory device for office actions, but the Foundation never reference it in deletion summaries (they either link to WP:OFFICE or state that the deletion is being performed under a DMCA request). Hut 8.5 10:38, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Probably G9 should be changed to "recreation of content previously deleted via office actions". This concept is similar to G4, though office actions (as I get it) are not the results of prior publicly accessible discussions, so adding them to G4 would dissolve the original idea. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 10:36, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

R3 and page moves

Redirects after page moves are routinely kept in WP:RFD, and this criterion becomes frequently used to nominate for speedy deletion the redirects created after moving pages from WP:MOS-incompatible names. Thus I propose to change the phrase "This criterion also applies to redirects created as a result of a page move of pages recently created at an implausible title" to "This criterion does not apply to redirects created as a result of a page move of pages recently created at an implausible title" in order to send all these redirects to WP:RFD for proper discussion. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 10:30, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

The reason that it applies to recently created pages that were moved is because a startling number of articles are created at absolutely hideous titles. Two such examples in my move log are BANURI VILLAGE (HIMACHAL PRADESH) and Dr. David A. Geller, MD, FACS (these are demonstrative, not exhaustive). Another is Who was the first lady judge of punjab and haryana high court at chandingarh (the page it was moved to was BLPPRODded, but could potentially become an article at some point). In all three cases, articles were created at those titles and someone had to move them to something reasonable; none of those are even remotely helpful (and the last one is even at WP:DAFT). Even beyond those, there are plenty of instances where articles are created with quotes in the title, with some sort of weird typo (I remember one which had w0hen instead of when), with foreign language and Latin characters put together, or missing a space between a letter and parenthesis; those are routinely deleted per R3, and a quick glance at my move log from when I was on the non-admin side of NPP will give you plenty of examples. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 21:54, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Unfortunately, I have just as many examples of bad R3 nominations (many of which are not being properly vetted by the deleting admins). For example, the current wording is incorrectly baiting editors to tag and delete a redirect under R3 because the redirect was "recently created" by the pagemove process despite the content having existed at the old title for several years. And while I agree with the implausibility of most of your examples, we have debated and kept several meeting your descriptions if they were not harmful - typos that appear implausible to you (and sometimes to me) turn out to be entirely plausible to users of alternate keyboards, for example.
If the R3 criterion had been proposed today, I seriously doubt that it would be approved. The term "implausible" is too open to interpretation and is not leading to nominations in which "most reasonable people should be able to agree whether an article meets the criterion." Rossami (talk) 22:23, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

I agree that R3 is frequently misapplied. Maybe we can make it clearer. Would it help to expand the criteria with something like "does not apply to redirects created when established articles are moved"? - Eureka Lott 22:44, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Don't think so. If the title is really implausible, it can be nominated for WP:RFD and will easily pass away in 7 days. In cases of WP:RM such decisions are even easier to make as the RM discussion already reveals some of the arguments. The problem is that we can't control bogus R3 application cases, so it is by far easier to send everyone to WP:RFD then picking a clear wording and watching its usage. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 08:54, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

As one of the normal RM closers, I will say that I don't always remove unlikely redirect pages. There is enough work fixing templates, and not free files and other cleanup. Also the inbound links can take a while to clear so at the time of close it is difficult to determine if the redirect should remain. So a review after allowing a day or more for cleanup would seem reasonable. But a default keep of all of these does not seem reasonable. Vegaswikian (talk) 22:21, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

I see three legitimate uses for R3 after page moves:

1. If the page was moved to the wrong title accidently (for example, Wikipedia:Social Media and Television).
2. Viable articles recently created under extremely bad titles (examples given above)
3. Meaningless filenames (for example, File:H65446wecdp.jpg).

Examples of R3 being misapplied are easy to find, see for example the logs of Iraqi revolt against the British, Misinformation and rumors about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Lamina emergent mechanisms (LEMs). Clearly some admins are ignoring the "recently created" clause completely. Yoenit (talk) 09:40, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that the criterion is being misapplied wildly, and even some of the examples you draw above may be worth keeping under certain circumstances (off-site linking, establish use patterns, etc.). Effectively there is no proper way to decide on whether such redirect should be deleted or kept without having the clean at least month-long stats. Given the ease of misapplication of criterion, I still think that forbidding the speedy deletion of the redirects after move is the best solution. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 10:24, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

• redirects are cheap and it is very difficult to identify redirects which no-one is going to find useful. Obviously redirects to pages deleted on notability grounds can go, and redirects where the creator made a typo and is asking for it to be cleaned up. But many redirects are deleted quite unnecessarily. There is also the problem that many redirects result from people correcting newbie errors, and if such redirects go then the newbies my think their creation has been deleted rather than merely renamed. ϢereSpielChequers 14:36, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Given the number of times that CSD#R3 is properly applied compared to the number of times that it is mis-applied on any given day, I would rather see the criterion deprecated altogether. The increased load to RfD would be manageable. Failing that, I think we need much clearer wording such as

R3. Implausible typos
Recently created redirects from implausible typos or misnomers. Implausible redirects are ones that no reasonable, good-faith editor would knowingly create or support. Redirects from apple to orange or from profanity to US President are implausible. Redirects from common misspellings or misnomers, some redirects in other languages, redirects ending with "(disambiguation)" that point to a disambiguation page or redirects which bring a pagetitle into compliance with the Manual of Style, on the other hand, are are not implausible. This criterion may also apply to redirects created as a result of a pagemove but only if the moved page was itself recently created at the implausible title. "Recently created" is measured from the creation of the title and is generally understood to be the last few hours or days at most. Pages with history (articles or stubs that have been converted into redirects) are ineligible for this criterion.

It's a lot longer than I'd like it to be and deprecation would be easier but I think that wording would clear up the worst of the confusion. Rossami (talk) 02:21, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Duplicate CAT:CSD subcategories?

CAT:CSD has links to the following categories:

• Category:Rescaled fairuse files more than 7 days old
• Category:Non-free files with orphaned versions more than 7 days old

Why do we have both? Seems that the first could easily be merged into the second, but I don't want to cause confusion with a CFD if there's an obvious reason that I'm overlooking. Nyttend (talk) 13:04, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

They differ in criteria: the first is G7, the second – G5. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 13:33, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Huh? Neither one has anything to do with uploader-requested deletion or deletion because of creation by blocked/banned users. If you mean F7 or F5, the two categories have equal effects: either way, the images have been tagged because they have old versions that haven't been used for at least a week. Nyttend (talk) 13:42, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it was a typo. Anyway, it may make sense to keep 1:1 category:criteria ratio. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk) 14:44, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

G6 question

Do we normally delete the subpages of an editor that has been indefinitely blocked? See User:TBrandley/Disney Channel (Kazakhstan)‎. GB fan 03:30, 14 March 2012 (UTC)